Enterprise Modelling Enterprise Integration Laboratory University of Toronto 4 Taddle Creek Rd., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G9 Tel: +1-416-978-6823 Fax: +1-416-971-2479 Email: msf@eil.utoronto.ca Updated: 18 February 2002

Enterprise Modelling TOVE Ontologies Enterprise Modelling Methodologies Process Interface Format (PIF) Research Papers EIL Theory Knowledge Management Enterprise Modelling Agent Architectures and Coordination Constraint-Directed Scheduling EIL Applications Enterprise Engineering Knowledge-Based Design Integrated Supply Chain Management. EIL Other EIL Alumni EIL Research Papers

Overview An Enterprise Model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional - spanning what is and what should be. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis and operation. In order to support enterprise integration, it is necessary that shareable representation of knowledge be available that minimizes ambiguity and maximizes understanding and precision in communication. Secondly, the creation of such a representation should eliminate much of the programming required to answer "simple" common sense questions about the enterprise. The goal of the TOVE (TOronto Virtual Enterprise) project is to create a generic, reusable enterprise data model that has the following characteristics: provides a shared terminology for the enterprise that each agent can jointly understand and use, defines the meaning of each term (aka semantics) in a precise and as unambiguous manner as possible, implements the semantics in a set of axioms that will enable TOVE to automatically deduce the answer to many "common sense" questions about the enterprise, and defines a symbology for depicting a term or the concept constructed thereof in a graphical context. The TOVE reusable representation represents a significant ontological engineering of industrial concepts. Our ontology spans: activities, state, causality, time, resources, inventory, order requirements, and parts. We have also axiomatised the definitions for portions of our knowledge of activity, state, time, and resources. The axioms are implemented in Prolog and provide for common-sense question answering via deductive query processing. Our future work focuses on the development of ontologies and axioms for quality, activity-based costing, and organization structures. An overview of our Enterprise Modelling research can be found in: Fox, M.S., Gruninger, M., (1998), "Enterprise Modelling", AI Magazine, AAAI Press, Fall 1998, pp. 109-121.. More details can be found in: TOVE Ontologies: Defines all of the ontologies that have been created in the Lab for modelling enterprises. Enterprise Modelling Methodologies: The methodology we use for constructing ontologies. Process Interface Format (PIF): Joint work performed with NIST. Research Papers: A listing of all of our ontology-related research papers.